On the limits of steganography

akram dawood, 2019

In recent years, the rapid growth of information technology and digital communication has become very important to secure information transmission between the sender and receiver. The art of information hiding has received much attention in the recent years as security of information has become a big concern in this internet era. Steganography-the art and science of hiding information into the other information so that the hidden information appears to be nothing to the human eyes has gained much attention. There are many ways to hide information inside an image, audio/video, document etc. But Image Steganography has its own advantages and is most popular among the others. This paper includes the important steganography methods and the main focus is on the review of steganography in digital images steganographic techniques in spatial domain such as least significant bit (LSB), pixel value differencing (PVD). The different aspects on which the steganography method depends are: robustness, capacity, undetectability. Keywords Steganography, Least significant bit (LSB), Pixel value differencing (PVD), Capacity, Stego-image, cover-image 1. Introduction Over the last two decades, the rapid development of internet requires confidential information that needs to be protected from the unauthorized users. This is accomplished through Data hiding. It is a method of hiding secret messages into a cover medium so that an unintended observer will not be aware of the existence of the hidden messages. This is achieved by steganography. The term steganography is retrieved from the Greek words stegos means cover and grafia meaning writing defining it as covered writing.[1]. Steganography is a technology that is used to hide secret information in digital media, thus hiding the fact that secret communication is taking place. By hiding secret information in less suspicious digital media, well-known channels, for example e-mail and social networking sites, are avoided, thereby reducing the risk of information being leaked in transit. Steganography is a technology concerned with ways of embedding a secret message in a cover message also known as a cover object in such a way that the existence of the embedded information is hidden. A secret message can be plaintext, ciphertext, an image, or anything that can be represented as a bit stream. The embedding process is sometimes parameterised by a secret key, called a stego key, and without knowledge of this key it is difficult for an unauthorised party to detect and extract the secret message. Once the cover object has information embedded in it, it is called a stego object. Steganography equation is 'Stego-medium = Cover medium + Secret message + Stego key. Theg eneral model

2005

There has been many hidden communication techniques proposed in the last few years. The focus was given to steganography to build such techniques. Utilizing stego-key(s) to hide secret messages into images strengthen the security of these techniques. However, adopting one of the available keyagreement protocols, to distribute stego-key(s) between the communicating parties, will destroy the infrastructure of the entire communication. The reason is that, these protocols perform their transactions on sight, while the desirable communications need to be completely hidden. In this paper, a key-generation unit is proposed to be added to the steganography general model. This unit utilizes a new key-agreement protocol, stego-KA, to help support the entire class of hidden communication techniques to exchange the sego-key(s) covertly. The proposed stego-KA protocol is based on Diffie-Hellman key establishment protocol and has significant advantages that support hidden communications.

International Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology, 2019

Today’s large demand of internet applications requires data to be transmitted in a secure manner. Data transmission in public communication system is not secure because of interception and improper manipulation by eavesdropper. So, the attractive solution for this problem is Steganography, which is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intend recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. Hiding Secret Data Using Image Steganography is the scheme of hiding the existence of secret information by concealing it into another medium such as image file. In this paper we mainly discuss different types of image steganographic methods, advantages and disadvantages. We focus in this paper on Hiding Secret Data Using Image Steganography, which has emerged as a prominent source of data hiding across novel telecommunication technologies such as covered voice-over-IP, audio conferencing, etc. The multitude of steganographic criteria has led to a great diversity in these system design techniques. In this paper, we review current digital image steganographic techniques and we evaluate their performance based on robustness, security and hiding capacity indicators. The primary goal of steganography is to reliably send hidden information secretly, not merely to obscure its presence. Steganography in today’s computer era is considered a sub-discipline of data communication security domain. Lately, new directions based on steganographic approaches started to emerge to ensure data secrecy. Rather than as a substitute to existing solutions, these approaches could achieve better data secrecy if combined with conventional security techniques. Modern techniques of steganography exploit the characteristics of digital media by utilizing them as carriers (covers) to hold hidden information.

—steganography is defined as the study of invisible co mmun ication. Steganography usually deals with the ways of hiding the existence of the communicated data in such a way that it remains confidential. It maintains secrecy between two communicat ing parties. In image steganography, secrecy is achieved by embedding data into cover image and generating a stego-image. There are different types of steganography techniques each have their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we review the different security and data hiding techniques that are used to implement a steganography such as LSB, ISB, M LSB etc. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I. INTRO DUCTION In today's world, the commun ication is the basic necessity of every growing area. Everyone wants the secrecy and safety of their communicat ing data. In our daily life, we use many secure pathways like internet or telephone for transferring and sharing informat ion, but it's not safe at a certain level. In order to share the information in a concealed manner two techniques cou ld be used. These mechanisms are cryptography and steganography.. In cryptography, the message is modified in an encrypted form with the help o f encryption key which is known to sender and receiver only. The message cannot be accessed by anyone without using the encryption key. However, the transmission of encrypted message may easily arouse attacker's suspicion, and the encrypted message may thus be intercepted, attacked or decrypted violently. In order to overco me the shortcomings of cryptographic techniques, steganography techniques have been developed. Steganography is the art and science of communicat ing in such a way that it hides the existence of the communicat ion. Thus, steganography hides the existence of data so that no one can detect its presence. In steganography the process of hiding in formation content inside any mult imedia content like image , audio, video is referred as a " Embedding ". For increasing the confidentiality of co mmun icating data both the techniques may be combined. The remain ing paper consist of following section : II. Steganography III. Conclusion and Future Work II. STEGANOGRAPHY Steganography is a Greek word wh ich means concealed writing. The word " steganos " means " covered " and " graphical " means " writing ". Thus, steganography is not only the art of hiding data but also hiding the fact of transmission of secret data. Steganography hides the secret data in another file in such a way that only the recipient knows the existence of message. In ancient time, the data was protected by hiding it on the back of wax, writing tables, stomach of rabbits or on the scalp of the slaves. But today's most of the people transmit the data in the form of text, images, video, and audio over the medium. In or der to safely transmission of confidential data, the multimed ia o bject like audio, video, images are used as a cover sources to hide the data A. Types of Steganography : ii. Text Steganography: It consists of hiding informat ion inside the text files. In this method, the secret data is hidden behind every nth letter of every words of text message. Numbers of methods are available for hiding data in text file. These methods are i) Format Based Method; ii) Random and Statistical Method; iii) Linguistics Method. iii. Image Steganography: Hid ing the data by taking the cov er object as image is referred as image steganography. In image steganography pixel intensities are used to hide the data. In digital steganography, images are widely used cover source because there are number of bits presents in digital representation of an image. iv. Audio Steganography: It involves hiding data in audio files. This method hides the data in WAV, AU and MP3 sound files. There are different methods of audio steganography. These methods are i) Low Bit Encoding ii) Phase Coding iii) Spread Spectru m. v. Video Steganography: It is a technique of hiding any kind of files or data into digital video format. In this case video (combination of pictures) is used as carrier for h iding the data. Generally discrete cosine transform (DCT) alter the values (e.g., 8.667 to 9) wh ich is used to hide the data in each of the images in the video, which is unnoticeable by the human eye. H.264, Mp4, MPEG, A VI are the formats used by video steganography. vi. Network or Protocol Steganography: It involves hiding the info rmat ion by taking the network protocol such as TCP, UDP, ICMP, IP etc, as cover object.. In the OSI layer network model there exist covert channels where steganography can be used.

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, 2020

Steganography is the art and science of invisible communication. This is accomplished through hiding information in other information, thus hiding the existence of the communicated information. The word steganography is derived from the Greek words "stegos" meaning "cover" and "grafia" meaning "writing" defining it as "covered writing". In image steganography the information is hidden exclusively in images. Digital Image Steganography system allows an average user to securely transfer text messages by hiding them in a digital image file. A combination of Steganography and encryption algorithms provides a strong backbone for its security. Digital Image Steganography system features innovative techniques for hiding text in a digital image file or even using it as a key to the encryption.

In the present data age, data sharing and Exchange has expanded exponentially. The risk of a gate crasher getting to mystery data has been a regularly existing concern for the information correspondence specialists. Cryptography and steganography are the most generally utilized procedures to survive this risk. Cryptography includes changing over message content into an unintelligible cipher. Then again, steganography inserts message into a cover media and shrouds its reality. Both these systems give some security of information neither of only them is sufficiently secure for sharing data over an unbound correspondence channel and are defenceless against interloper assaults. Despite the fact that these methods are regularly joined together to accomplish more elevated amounts of security yet there is a need of an exceptionally secure framework to exchange data over any correspondence media limiting the risk of interruption. In this paper we propose a propelled arrangement of encoding information that joins the highlights of cryptography, steganography alongside media information stowing away. This framework will be more secure than some other these strategies alone and furthermore as contrasted with steganography & cryptography consolidated Frameworks Visual steganography is a standout amongst the most secure types of steganography accessible today. It is generally regularly actualized in image records. Anyway installing information into image changes its shading frequencies typically. To beat this consistency, we propose the idea of various cryptography where the information will be scrambled into a cipher and the cipher will be covered up into a sight and sound image document in scrambled arrangement. We will utilize customary cryptographic systems to accomplish information encryption and visual steganography calculations will be utilized to conceal the encoded information.

Indian Institute of Education, 2023

Steganography is the science and art of secret communication between two sides that attempt to hide the content of the message. It is the science of embedding information into the cover image without causing a loss in the cover image after embedding Steganography is the art and technology of writing hidden messages in such a manner that no person, apart from the sender and supposed recipient, suspects the lifestyles of the message. It is gaining huge attention these days as it does now not attract attention to its information's existence

IJCRT(www.ijcrt.org), 2020

The innovation of technology and having fast internet make information to distribute over the planet easily and economically. this is often made people worry about privacy and works. Steganography may be a technique that forestalls unauthorized users to possess access to big data. The steganography provides methods that users can hide and blend their information with other information that make them difficult to acknowledge by attackers. In this, we review some techniques of steganography spatial and frequency domains. Also, we explain the kinds of steganography host documents. It also can pose serious problems due to it difficult to detect. Network surveillance and monitoring systems won't flag messages or files that contain steganographic data. and that we also see some applications, pros, and cons of steganography.

In this paper we analyze and test several steganographic techniques on still images. We show that embedding a large amount of data into the picture it can modify its visible properties. We compare the RSA and the elliptic curve (ECC) based digital signatures, and we analyze their advantages and disadvantages in steganography. In steganography it is important that the embedded data size should be minimized. Using ECC minimization of the embedded information is possible, because the minimal block size is smaller than in the case of RSA.